MacDonald on Orr on Dawkins: Part II

May 28, 2011 • 11:04 am

Over at Choice in Dying, Eric has put up the second and final part of his defense of Dawkins’s The God Delusion against its critique published by Allen Orr in The New York Review of Books. And MacDonald defuses the most important issue that has occupied—nay, obsessed—Dawkins’s critics:

Perhaps Dawkins could have profited by a deeper acquaintance with the thoughts of theologians — even meticulous ones — for then he would have had graphic evidence of the irrelevance of so much that passes itself off as profound and important. If Eriugena has something important to say about subjectivity, as Terry Eagleton alleges, then it belongs to philosophy, not theology. But Rahner on grace? In the absence of some reasonable assurance that there really is a god, and that this god visits the faithful with his/her/its grace — well, there’s not much room for fruitful discussion here. . .

. . . Orr is simply mistaken in my view. He takes theology altogether too seriously. He accuses Dawkins of not paying enough attention to the meticulous argumentation of theologians, but he has not given us one example of how attention to this meticulous argumentation would have contributed to his project.

Having read the “meticulous reasoning” of more sophisticated theologians (as I know Richard has), I can’t see how their inclusion would have changed or improved the book one iota. Just thinking about the theologians I’ve read lately—the likes of Eagleton, Haught, C. S. Lewis (Ceiling Cat help me) and Polkinghorne—all Dawkins could have done was to present their mushy arguments and rebut them.  That would have added nothing to the book.   Absent new and more convincing evidence for god, or for the nature of His being, none of which is provided by these authors, all we would get is lengthy rebuttal of tedious and unproductive theological masturbation.  In separate comments to Eric’s post, though, both Tim Harris and I have asked him to discuss whether or how The God Delusion might have benefited from tackling theology more extensively.

Eric also deals with Orr’s criticism that the twentieth century’s “experiment in secularism” (read Mao, Stalin, and Hitler) showed that atheism is by no means less disasterous than religion.

The longest cell in the history of life

May 28, 2011 • 9:11 am

One of my favorite “proofs” of evolution is the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN)—the nerve that innervates the larynx from the brain, helping us speak and swallow.  It takes a very circuitous course, looping from the brainstem down around the aorta and then back up to the larynx.  Here’s its course in humans:

It’s a prime example of “bad design”, that is, of the ham-handedness of any creator that was responsible for designing organisms. Of course, we aren’t designed, but evolved from very different ancestors.  That’s why our bodies are full of glitches and kludges, and this nerve is one of them.  It’s much longer than it need be, taking a tortuous route several feet longer than the direct path from brain to neck.

I’ve talked about the evolutionary reasons for this many times; you can see the full explanation in WEIT or read about it here.  This diagram shows how it worked: the nerve used to line up with a blood vessel, both servicing the gills of our fishy ancestors.  When the vessel moved backwards during evoution, the RLN was constrained to remain behind it, still retaining its connection to the larynx, which evolved from a gill arch.  The nerve could not “break” to attain the shortest route, for that would not be possible by natural selection: it would interrupt the nerve transmission and be maladaptive.  Click to enlarge:

As I also point out in WEIT, this poor design reaches ludicrous heights, so to speak, in giraffes, whose long neck makes the RLN take a 15-foot detour:

Do remember that this nerve consists of a bundle of nerve cells, each of which travels the entire length of the nerve.  Thus the giraffe must have nerve cells (including the axons) about fifteen feet long. That is a very long cell!

But there are even longer.  In a new paper now in press at Acta Palaeontologica Polnoica (free at the link, reference below), anatomist Mathew J. Wedel simply thought a bit more about the nerve: what would it look like in animals with even longer necks?  Those, of course, would include the sauropod dinosaurs.  And in some of them, like the gynormous Supersaurus, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and its included cells, could have been longer than 28 meters (92 feet).  Here’s a diagram from Wedel’s paper, which is very clear and well written (he also explains it in a post at his website, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week):

There’s little doubt, by the way, that dinosaurs did have recurrent laryngeal nerves.  All living tetrapods do, whether they be amphibians, reptiles, or mammals.  This suggests very strongly that the RLN is an ancestral condition in tetrapods, resulting from their mutual evolution from fishy ancestors.

But wait, there’s more! (Does this sound like an ad for Ginsu knives?)  Even longer cells can be found in living organisms, in particular the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus.  Wedel speculates, reasonably (I doubt that dissections have been done), that nerves running from the whale’s brain to the flukes of its tail might be 30 meters or more (98 feet) in length.

But there’s still more!  The sauropod dinosaur Amphicoelias fragillimus was, arguably, as long as 49-58 meters (161-190 feet) from snout to tail.   The nerves innervating the tail could have been only a meter or so shorter than that.  Now we’re not sure about the neck length of A. fragillimus: its RLN could have been 38 meters long (124 feet) or more; remember that the nerve has to run the length of the 19-meter neck twice.

So what was the longest cell in the history of life? Our best guess is 40-50 meters (130-160 feet!) for nerves innervating the tail in the longest sauropods:

Wedel points out that cells this long pose some obvious problems to the physiologist:

  • Pain signals traveling along the RLN in sauropods could have moved extremely slowly.  Wedel notes that “unmyelinated vagal afferent fibers have conduction velocities as low as 0.5 m/s, and some unmyelinated fibers are present even in the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe.  Unless selected for faster response, similar unmyelinated fibers would have taken almost a full minute to relay ‘slow pain’ signals to the brain of Supersaurus!” Wedel notes, though, that an injury to the dinosaur’s throat could have been detected more quickly from damage to nerves in the skin of the throat, whose path to the brain was only a meter long.
  • A bigger problem: nerve cells must transport material from the cell body itself to the tips of the axons.  It’s done through a process called “axoplasmic streaming”, which carries different molecules at different rates.  Neurotransmitters and enzymes, for example, travel 200-400 mm (8-16 inches) per day, but the transport of some proteins is slower: 0.1 -1.0 mm per day! As Wedel notes, “Even at 1 mm/day, slow axoplasmic streaming would take more than four decades to move proteins from the nerve cell body to the axon terminals in the longest neurons of large whales.  This, of course, is not feasible, and Wedel suggests that either axoplasmic streaming must be much faster in whales (and in dinosaurs), or there is some other way they transport proteins through nerve cells.  Here’s a fertile field for cell biologists!

Regardless, the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the long-necked dinosaurs is not only a “monument of inefficiency,” as Wedel notes in his title, but an even better monument to evolution.

___________

Wedel, M.J. 2011.  A monument of inefficiency: the presumed course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in sauropod dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, in press. DOI:10.4202/app.2011.0019

From Wedel’s website:

Caturday felid: Cooper, cat photographer

May 28, 2011 • 5:06 am

I’ve always thought that, among the arts, photography is unique in one respect: a rank amateur is capable of taking a world-class photograph, one that could be exhibited in a gallery were it taken by a famous photographer.  (I must say that I took at least one that would do credit to Henri Cartier-Bresson.)  Painting may occasionally meet this standard too—one hears of two-year-olds, or chimps, who have produced abstract paintings that could be mistaken for great art.

At any rate, this question comes up with the arrival on the art scene of Cooper, an American shorthair from Seattle.  As described in an article at ArtInfo, once a week Cooper’s owner sends him out with a digital camera affixed to his collar, programmed to snap a photo every two minutes.

And the art just pours in:

As revealed in the “Best of the CAT CAM” album on Facebook, Cooper’s photos are vernacular visions of the feline artist’s environs, captured in saturated, sunny colors — Cooper rarely ventures out in inclement weather — that have an air of William Eggleston about them. One work, titled “Risqué,” takes a saucy look up a lady’s skirt, while others present ominous close-ups of Cooper’s (human) baby brother, Cameron, who slumbers peacefully as his rival for the Cross’ affection stalks ever closer… until he hovers only a whisker away. As a stylistic flourish, the photographer cat has turned a defect in his camera into something of a signature: all of his pictures are dated July 2006.

Still other photos capture tulips, the corner of a “Star Wars” poster, tall grasses, a lily-white statue of the Madonna, and garden gnomes espied through the underbrush. A particularly dramatic series portrays other cats on the prowl, many of whom social media commenters have posited might be Cooper’s secret girlfriends. (The tail-chaser is not coy about his charms, boasting on his site that “the local lady cats rather dig a bad boy with a camera.”) But it is the love of the critics that gratifies Cooper the most, such as when the Daily Mail eruditely weighs in on one of his choicest works: “in one hilarious snap the moment he mocks a dog trapped behind the glass of someone’s front porch is taken with almost human-like humor.”

I present some of Cooper’s oeuvre.  The first one deals with the theme of mortality. Impending death, shown by the tree in fall foliage, is juxtaposed with a plant that has not yet senesced.  The telephone line provides an ironic image of human communication, which of course will cease with death.

In this one, which I call Homage à Eggleston, Cooper uses the garish colors of sunset to make an ironic comment on the artificiality of modern life, in which there is no chromatic distinction between a dwelling and a plant:

Continuing his leitmotif of death (perhaps inspired by the fabled “nine lives” of his species), Cooper gives us another mournful view.  Life, as symbolized by the sun and the telephone wires (another recurring theme in Cooper’s work), is wryly juxtaposed with the gloomy blanket of snow that supresses all life, including that below ground. Note how the precedence of nature over human striving is seen as the telephone wires “melt” in the sun:

Although Cooper rarely essays portraits, this one, of a vagrant fellow cat in Seattle, is nothing less than a rumination on human responsibility, for it makes us question whether our own species is responsible for his homelessness, or whether we ameliorate his condition by providing shelter, in the form of a car.

Finally, Cooper is not above a little self-referential humor.  Here his shadow insistently reminds us that he is, after all, a cat, and that art need not be the purr-view of humans alone.

Here’s a video of Cooper and his work (check out Cooper’s other videos on his Facebook site).

Cooper had an exhibit:  here he is at a display of his choicest works with his “owners” Michael and Deirdre Cross:

And this feline polymath has now branched out into video.  Cooper, of course, has a Facebook page (I’ve already “liked” it).

h/t: Grania

Squee quadrufecta

May 27, 2011 • 12:01 pm

Because it’s Friday, I’ll post the three four best animal videos I’ve received this week from readers.  The second and third have gone viral, and I’ve gotten them from multiple people.

First, two-month-old clouded leopard cubs (hand-reared) from the Nashville Zoo:

An otter racing a child.  If you think the child is simply running along with the otter, see what happens 35 seconds in:

This video, also viral, is driving everyone nuts at Imperial College Silwood.  Warning: the song is a meme that may well embed itself in your brain—exactly as Dawkins’s “Punch in the presence of the passengare.”  What songs have driven you mad?

This had only 316 views this morning! Unless you’re made of stone, it will give you an endorphin rush:

BioLogos reviews my book!

May 27, 2011 • 9:20 am

I was vaguely aware that BioLogos was writing something about WEIT, but given the source I hadn’t paid much attention, and didn’t read it until today. (I was, however, curious to see how they’d deal with a book that contains straight science with very little mention of religion.) I now see that the review is in three parts (1, 2, and 3 at respective links); let it not be said that BioLogos does a cursory job. The review is by Robert Bishop, a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College (Illinois), a Christian school not far from Chicago.  Bishop also has a master’s in physics and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.

I don’t have a lot to say about the review, which is largely accommodationist drivel, but would like to highlight a few items.

Part 1 is generally positive, and emphasizes some of the “myths” that Christians have about how evolution works (e.g., “it all happens by chance”).  That’s all good.  Bishop notes:

The breadth and clarity of Coyne’s explanation and discussion of the evidence supporting evolution is impressive. Christians who have even a passing interest in science should give what he has to say careful, prayerful reflection.

Well, I’d much prefer scientific rather than prayerful reflection, but I’ll take what praise I can get.

In Part 2, Bishop becomes more critical, raising a point that is often made about WEIT by either theologians or creationists:

Two brief comments: First, although Coyne doesn’t own up to it, all of his comments about a designer are theological rather than scientific. After all comments about what a good or bad designing god would do are statements about the character, wisdom and plans of such a god. Such comments don’t tell us anything about the existence of such a designer. If anything, they only tell us about how Coyne appraises the work of such a designing god. . .

. . .The second problem is that Coyne–along with many Christians–treats evolutionary explanations as competing with or replacing God’s activity in creation. However, that is a theological interpretation of evolutionary theory, an interpretation that presumes God can’t or wouldn’t be involved in evolution.

No, I don’t own up, and won’t, to having made theological rather than scientific arguments.  The arguments are purely scientific, in the sense that features of organisms violate the empirical expectations we’d have if they were designed by a beneficent and wise creator.  True, the arguments don’t bear on the existence of a designer, but they weren’t meant to. They were meant to say something about the nature of a designer if you assume one exists.

Organisms are full of flaws.  Considering only humans, we have descending testicles that can cause problems, very difficult childbirth in females, vestigial wisdom teeth (and appendixes) that can become impacted or infected, and our recurrent laryngeal nerve, which, instead of connecting the brain and larynx by the shortest route, loops way down around the heart and comes back up again.  These are not features an intelligent designer would have given us. But those features are completely understandable in light of evolution.  The nerve, for example, was constrained to form a long loop because a blood vessel moved backwards during our evolution from fishy ancestors, forcing the nerve (which once lay next to that vessel) to elongate around it to retain its connection with the larynx. (More about this tomorrow.)

I used this argument for several reasons.  First, it is empirical, because it shows something about the nature of a designer if a designer was responsible for animals and plants.  It shows first that the designer was not “intelligent,” in the sense of not setting up body plans in an efficient way. Second, and more telling, if animal body plans do reflect design, then we can conclude that the designer wanted to make things look as though they evolved.  For these flaws are not just flaws—they are flaws that are completely understandable in light of evolution!  There are comprehensible evolutionary reasons for all of these flaws, involving our ancestry or developmental/genetic constraints. We have vestigial tailbones because our ancestors had tails, our wisdom teeth are remnants of when we were more herbivorous primates with larger jaws, and so on.

It is perfectly proper procedure to infer something about a designer from the results of design.  Archaeologists do this all the time.  So if we must think, as many Christians do, that organisms were designed by a celestial being, we can use the characteristics of those organisms to infer something about that being. That’s an empirical procedure.

Finally, I used this argument for historical reasons: it was one that Darwin employed repeatedly throughout the Origin to cast doubt on creationist explanations.  One reason why Darwin was so successful in convincing his contemporaries (and not just the scientists, either) of the truth of evolution was because his observations were inconsistent with the view of God that many people then held.  Throughout the book Darwin keeps asking, rhetorically, “Why would the creator do stuff like this?”  And none of that “stuff” made sense if you conceived of God as a wise and careful designer.  Now theologians can, and have, re-envisioned God as someone who designed evolution and then let it take its course. What choice did they have in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence?  But Darwin’s “theological” argument is still powerful, as witnessed by the many creationists who tie themselves into knots trying to explain evolutionary “design flaws” as the product of God’s wisdom.

In part 3 of his review, Bishop wishes fervently that scientists and Christians could engage in mutually respectful dialogue:

Imagine that Coyne and I engage in genuine conversation about science and Christianity. I try to understand more fully his view that there is no God at work in nature and that science has no need of countenancing a being who is neither necessary for scientific practices nor observable by scientific methods. He tries to understand my view that God is at work through natural processes so that everything that happens in nature is both fully natural and fully Divine (concurrence), and how that leaves everything in the theoretical and experimental practices of science unchanged from how we’ve conceived them since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution (in short, this is because the natural processes science studies are God’s typical mode of mediated action in creation). I get clearer on his worries about what he perceives as a threat to scientific explanations if there is a God who has the power to circumvent natural processes and their regularities. Coyne gets clearer on why the picture of concurrence doesn’t offer theological explanation as an alternative to science, but instead offers a theological interpretation of science.

Such a dialogue could never occur, at least on my part.  For the first thing I’d ask Bishop would be this, “What is your evidence that there is a god who is at work through natural processes?”  He would either cite the Bible or his own personal revelations, and that would be the end of that.  Without evidence for a god, there’s no point in having such a discussion.  And I don’t reject God because he’s a “threat to scientific explanations,” either.  Like Laplace, I reject a god because it’s unnecessary in scientific explanations, and because there’s no evidence for a god.  And if a god did intervene in a way I could study—if, for example, prayers worked—I would find that even more interesting.

Bishop goes on at length about why science and religion are compatible.  Most of his evidence rests on the fact that some scientists in the past were religious:

The historical proof that science and Christianity aren’t fundamentally incompatible is the Scientific Revolution itself. Its architects were both methodologically and theologically serious and were theistically rather than deistically inclined (deism in the European tradition arose in the 18th century). They saw no fundamental inconsistency between science (or reason) and a God who could intervene in the world if God so desired (e.g., Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton).

This, of course, misses the whole point: I see science/faith incompatibility as a philosophical and methodological issue, not a historical one.  Just because Newton could rely on revelation at some times and hard evidence at others doesn’t mean that he was using compatible methodologies.

And, at the end—as we see so often these days at BioLogos—Bishop lapses into JesusSpeak:

As long as Coyne and so many others continue to view the relationship between science and religion as a matter of integration rather than the reconciliation characteristic of actual relationships, acrimony will continue and we’ll miss out on the reconciliation science and faith already have in Jesus Christ (Col. 1:20).

I’m supposed to be an accommodationist to help bring people to Jesus?  What is Bishop smoking?  Oh, and some “actual relationships” aren’t characterized by reconciliation.  When people are incompatible, they often get divorced.

Evidence against New Atheism: Exhibit B?

May 27, 2011 • 5:28 am

[JAC note: Reader Sigmund and I had some correspondence about the paper discussed below.  This inspired me to ask him to write a guest post about it, and he kindly complied.]

by Sigmund

While there may be fifty ways to leave your lover, there is only one way to teach evolution.

At least that’s what we’ve been told. The accommodationist strategy of recent years advocates that the public voice of evolutionary science should exclusively be that of theistic evolutionists.

According to Chris Mooney,

I would try to empower the messengers that they (religious folks) will listen to, people who are more like them, people who they trust.  That means people in their community, pastors, scientists who are religious, people who are closer to them and can speak a bit more of their language and may be able to move them.  It will still be very hard.  You will still trigger a lot of resistance, but I think there will be more openness than, kind of, the frontal assault from someone with whom you have very little or nothing in common: an atheist.

In contrast, the alternative approach, supported by the Gnus, emphasizes the advocacy of accurate science without recourse to religious views.

Until recently, however, little study has been done on the question of which approach works best or whether additional factors may enhance or detract from the success of particular strategies. While no single study could hope to address all the variables that affect this question, it should be possible to address individual elements.

One such analysis was recently published in a science journal, attracting claims from commenters on the Richard Dawkins forum that it discovered ‘the bleeding obvious’,  from Uncommon Descent that it was a ‘push poll’ (a dishonest marketing technique win which biased questions are used to push one particular viewpoint) designed to attack ‘Intelligent Design’, and even from The Intersocktion, claming that it showed the error of the new atheist approach and the value of the accommodationist strategy.

According to Jamie L Vernon, the new contributor to Chris Mooney’s blog The Intersection, we finally have what we’ve all been waiting for—evidence that proves the dangers posed by the New Atheists.  “Surprise!—the most effective tactics are not those used by Richard Dawkins and the “New Atheists.”

Well? Are any of those accusations correct?

Well, no, no and no—although not necessarily in that order.

Let’s briefly go through the paper to see what questions the authors addressed, what results they found, and, finally, what conclusions we can draw from this analysis.

The study in question, “Death and Science: The Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design and Discomfort with Evolution”, by Jessica L. Tracy, Joshua Hart and Jason P. Martens, was published by the online journal PLoS One at the end of March. The authors, based at the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver and the Department of Psychology, Union College, Schenectady, New York, described their aim as being to examine “the psychological motives underlying widespread support for intelligent design theory (IDT), a purportedly scientific theory that lacks any scientific evidence; and antagonism toward evolutionary theory (ET), a theory supported by a large body of scientific evidence.”

The authors began with a hypothesis: “heightened mortality awareness would lead individuals to embrace IDT and reject ET; in other words, shifting one’s opinion on these theories is a “terror management” strategy, stimulated by the basic need to maintain psychological security”.  This is a complicated way of saying that thinking about dying will make people less supportive of materialistic views of life and more supportive of teleological ideas such as ‘Intelligent Design’, presumably because ‘Intelligent Design’ is frequently associated with a supernatural designer, namely God, who supposedly offers a handy life extension in the form of an eternity in heaven.

The authors carried out five separate studies to address the question.

In all five studies, the authors began by manipulating “mortality salience” (MS induction) in their test subjects. What this means, in effect, is that they got the subjects to think about their own mortality, by getting them to write about feelings aroused by thinking of their own death.  As a control, half the students were asked to write about feelings aroused by imagining a generalized negative thought, in this case dental pain. This allowed the authors to examine whether heightened thoughts about death and mortality have an effect on the acceptance of one or other of the subsequently presented test options.

The test was a two-part procedure. Following MS induction, the participants were asked to read two passages of text, both 174 words long, that were pastiches of views on evolution or intelligent design. The first (the ‘Evolutionary Theory’ choice) consists of sentences from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, while the other (the ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ (ID) choice) consists of sentences from Darwin’s Black Box, written by Michael Behe and from the foreword to “Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, by Behe, William Dembski, and Steve Meyer.

Both texts are similar in tone and content, and advocate for their choices by suggesting that the respective theories are of fundamental importance in science, are overwhelmingly backed by the evidence and are supported by many scientists and philosophers.

(If you know anything about biology, the Behe text will automatically induce a reaction of WTF!)

Importantly, neither text makes an explicitly religious claim—the Dawkins text has nothing in it that could not be said by theistic evolutionists such as Ken Miller or Francis Collins.  The passages did not present the reader with a choice between philosophical naturalism and ID but, rather, between the current scientific consensus of evolutionary theory and ID.

The second part of the test was a series of six questions that, according to the authors, assessed the participants’ “views about the author’s expertise and their belief in the theory referred to in the passage.” Specifically, participants rated each author, using a 9-point scale, on intelligence, knowledge, agreement with his views, and truth of his opinion. They then rated their agreement with two statements, on a 5-point scale: ‘‘Evolutionary [Intelligent design] theory is a solid theory supported by a great deal of evidence’’ and ‘‘Evolutionary [Intelligent design] theory is the best explanation we have of life’s origins.’’

The use of six questions in this analysis, rather than a single agree/disagree choice, allowed the authors to employ certain statistical techniques, common to the social sciences,  that test the internal consistency or reliability of a series of test scores from a sample group. This method also allowed the authors to examine whether the results reflected negative reactions to the authors, Dawkins or Behe, rather than to evolutionary theory or ID.  In the words of the authors: “we wanted to ensure that results are not due to an effect of mortality salience on attitudes toward these two authors but not the theories, so we also ran all analyses using 2-item scales comprising only the last two items, which asked about views toward the theories but not the authors.”

So, does heightened mortality salience (MS) affect whether a test subject chooses Evolutionary Theory or Intelligent Design?   According to the paper the answer is yes, but in ways that differed depending strongly on which type of subjects were tested and whether additional factors were involved.

Five separate studies were performed on either groups of psychology students, life science students, mixed university students, or a group of nonstudents selected to represent the general population.

The results from the first three groups studied (psychology students, general university students and general public) seemed to show a partial agreement with the authors’ hypothesis—mainly showing that increased MS caused a drop in support for evolutionary theory rather than an increase in support for ID in groups 2 and 3. Group one, however, showed increased support for ID without a significant drop in support for evolutionary theory.

The last two studies, however, are of particular interest.

Study 4

The authors looked at 269 UBC psychology students, with half the students instructed to read a passage by Carl Sagan. The text in question encouraged a naturalistic search for meaning in the universe.

There is a two-part result for this study. The first group, who didn’t read the Sagan passage, produced a result very similar to that of study one (no significant change in support for evolutionary theory but a statistically significant increase in support for ID after MS stimulation.) But the second group—those people who had read the Sagan text—provided very different results, showing a significant increase in support for evolutionary theory and a significant decrease in support for ID.

No control text was read by the non-Sagan half of this study and this point is noted by its authors, who suggest that a control would have been a neutral passage, which they think would have been of little use.  It is questionable whether that is the correct interpretation.  An alternative explanation might be that reading an additional text supporting the scientific consensus in the Dawkins text and described to the participants as coming from ”one of the world’s most famous scientists” might be construed as an argument from authority that would increase support for evolutionary theory.  In such case a suitable control passage might significantly alter the result.

Study 5

This involved 99 UBC undergraduate and graduate students from the life sciences who followed the same protocol as study one. This group showed a similar result to the ‘Sagan group’ of study 4 (increase in support for evolutionary theory and decrease in support for ID following MS stimulation.)

In other words biology students, in contrast to the population at large, are immune to the negative effects of induced mortality salience and, in fact, become even more supportive of evolutionary theory in such circumstances.

*******

Okay, so how do we interpret these results? Are we confident that they are accurate, and reflect how psychological manipulation affects acceptance of evolution in society at large?  There are clearly some problems with the study. The samples involved are not particularly large, I am wary about the way the authors altered the protocol for study group 3 and, as I mentioned before, the result of study 4—the most novel of the entire analysis—is at least questionable due to the control problem  On the other hand, some of the trends discovered seem to be replicated within the study.  For instance, the result of study 1 is mirrored in the first (non-Sagan) part of study 4 and the result of study 2 reflects that of study 3, indicating that amongst the general population an increased MS causes a negative response to evolutionary theory (although it doesn’t increase support for ID).

But does the study say anything about the value of accommodationism versus confrontationalism?

Perhaps. The result of study 4, if validated, indicates that emphasizing a naturalistic search for meaning in life (the Sagan passage) strongly ameliorates the negative effect induced by heightened thoughts of mortality.

Interestingly, however, this naturalistic approach is not one that theistic evolutionists advocate! Rather’ it’s much closer to the public approach of prominent Gnus like Dawkins. The passage from Sagan, below, disavows the supernatural aspect that is the common feature of theistic evolution.  While it doesn’t attack religion per se, it is essentially a passage promoting a viewpoint of philosophical naturalism, or to put it in its proper scare quotes, “atheism”.

It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. And understanding the nature of the world and the nature of ourselves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about. Truth should be pursued, and science helps us pursue it; science gives us meaning. All we have to do is maintain some tolerance for ambiguity, because right now science does not have all the answers. This tolerance goes with the courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations and knowledge tell us. The more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from something outside science, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.  If we are merely matter that is intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less, or does that make matter more? We make our purpose.  And we have to work out what that is, for ourselves.

In summary, the study suggests that public advocacy of evolution might be most effective when combined with an appeal to a materialistic approach to the search for meaning in life.  At present this is more a suggestion than a conclusion (the ‘Sagan effect’ was unfortunately tested only on psychology students rather than the general public).  The finding that distinct groups react in diverse ways to the same stimuli suggests that an optimal approach should include multiple approaches. Whatever way you look at it, this study is not good news for the accommodationist strategy.

I think we can agree with Intersocktion poster Jamie L Vernon that “this article offers fertile territory for discussion on ways to improve communication strategies for those of us who wish to effectively reach those in the religious community,” although one suspects that Jamie didn’t realize that message of the paper is actually that advocating atheistic world views improves the acceptance of evolution.

Sean Carroll: We don’t have immortal souls

May 26, 2011 • 1:49 pm

Can you prove a negative? I’ve argued that this is the classical last-ditch defense of God, and, beyond the existence of a deity itself, nowhere is that argument more salient that when comes to the soul and the afterlife.  How could we possibly get evidence against a soul, or against its immortal survival in regions above?  This question also relates to the frequent claims of accommodationists—employees of the National Center for Science Education come to mind—that you can’t test the supernatural.

Well, you can under one condition: if the supernatural is supposed to leave traces in the material world but doesn’t (rain dances and prayer are two examples).  A subset of this occurs when  “supernatural” claims posit phenomena that are totally incoherent or nonsensical according to what we know about the universe. (Remember, conclusions about the absence of God and his workings are, like all scientific conclusions, provisional. There is evidence for a deity that I would accept; I just haven’t seen any.)

Over at Cosmic Variance, physicist Sean Carroll claims that we already know enough to dismiss the idea of an immortal soul as a scientific possibility (that is, a thing that has a real existence)—and I agree.  His post from Monday, “Physics and the immortality of the soul,” has already stimulated a huge number of comments (I haven’t read them).   His argument is simple, and based on physics:

Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident. . .

But let’s say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:

[it’s the Dirac equation.]  . . . As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain. If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. . .

. . Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.

Indeed!  Those who specify the existence of souls and afterlives in this scientific era must do more than issue fuzzy-minded gobbledygook.  They must specify more precisely what they’re talking about, and how it’s supposed to work.  If we’re supposed to survive after death, what part of us survives, and how?  And what is this soul, exactly?  We’re no longer in the Middle Ages, so theologians who make empirical claims must be empirically specific.  As Sean notes, there are biological questions as well.  The first ones that occurs to me are these: where, exactly, in the human lineage did the soul emerge? (Or do other species have souls?)  Was it put into that lineage by God, or did it evolve? If instilled by God, when?  And where in our body does it reside? If we retain our memories and personalities in the afterlife, how do they exist without neurons?

Of course theologians will respond to all of the above like this, “We don’t have to tell you what souls are, or in what form you survive after death.  We just know it’s true because we just know that there’s a God and that he allows these things.”

The proper answer to that, of course, is Hitchens’s Dictum: “What can be asserted without evidence. . .”

It’s time to make theologians get specific.  For too long we’ve let them get away with fuzzy-mindedness.

And Good for Carroll.  He’s a nice guy—the kind of guy whom you don’t expect to be be stirring up this hornets’ nest—but he loves truth more than he loves adulation. (There’s no easier way to gain public approbation than by coddling religion.)

There’s a lot more than this in Sean’s post, so go read it.